Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#121

Post by saltcured » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:40 PM UTC

Can't say I regret it, but did not enjoy when a small enhancement PR I wanted to push to an academic visualization toolkit took more of my time to wrangle the licensing than to write the patches.

When I did veer into enterprise environments, I regretted the NDAs I signed. It was annoying to later want to share some illustrative anecdotes but have to censor myself. And it wasn't like they were state secrets, just stuff that was amusing and apropos but someone might be able to trace back to the NDA contract period due to the small world we seem to inhabit.

Otherwise, I've been in university-linked R&D and generally went with folks who declared projects open source before we began any real effort on it. That's the only way to be sure.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#122

Post by man4 » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:43 PM UTC

pentamassiv wrote: post #105

I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#123

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:43 PM UTC

erulabs wrote: post #99

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again. Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well,…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#124

Post by nadermx » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

I think with anything, it's a love hate. I open sourced https://github.com/nadermx/backgroundremover, and it's been cool in terms of vanity, but depending on my mood it either feels cool or like a chore to do work on it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#125

Post by booleandilemma » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:44 PM UTC

I don't open source anything, because we live in a world where people who get jobs and rewards are not the same people who put in the work. I don't wish to feed that system. Other comments here are great examples of why no one should.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#126

Post by sfRattan » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

tliltocatl wrote: post #36

sexyman48 wrote: post #2

Steve Ballmer nailed it when he said GPL is a cancer. No professional programmer wants to open source anything, but once one competitor does it, he must follow suit to stay competitive.

The marginal cost of software is zero and therefore the just price in a perfect market is zero. You can compete on delivering features quickly (and that's how all 80-00s software was - they were able to charge simply because no one was offering same features yet), but other than that there is no way software can be a profitable product without being a monopoly - and monopolies is not a thing to be tolerated. You can…

Looking out across the software landscape, it seems to me software companies do just fine if they achieve some-to-most of:

1. Build a piece of software that actually solves one or more problems.

2. Keep ownership private and limited. Once you're publicly traded, long term planning becomes impossible and "line must go up" becomes the reigning false god.

3. Sell a perpetual commercial license to the version-at-purchase, and offer subscription for updates after purchase. On cancellation, stop providing updates but do not disable that customer's last working version.

4. Optionally, dual license under a free license that prevents competitors from eating your lunch (usually latest GPL or AGPL, depending on context).

If you're implementing the above items, it's absolutely possible to run a profitable company.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#127

Post by blibble » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:48 PM UTC

I regret everything I ever open sourced

my works had one condition: attribution

now it's all been slopped up by "AI", without attribution, primarily to devalue the labour of software developers

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#128

Post by pentamassiv » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:49 PM UTC

smashed wrote: post #113

pentamassiv wrote: post #105

I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…

Keep in mind that they probably use it or at least discovered it explicitly because it's open source. So either you don't release it and they use something else, or you release it and they use it. Option 2 sounds like giving you more exposure and more opportunities in the long run.

Sure, it would be hard to monetize and while it took countless hours to iron out many of its bugs, it is definitely not rocket science. I contribute to open source software expecting nothing in return because all software I use is also open source. It's my way of giving back and I love the knowledge that it is useful to people and hearing about their projects. So far I did not have any benefits from it but continue doing it anyways. It makes me happy to see more and more people using it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#129

Post by TheTon » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:55 PM UTC

No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways.

Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today of course, but back then all you could do was either be on the Xbox or sit around refreshing a web page, so the app was useful. I published the source and the binaries on Google Code, partly because I just wanted to share the app for free, and partly because I wanted to be transparent that I was handling the Xbox login credentials safely.

One day the app blew up and got a lot of coverage in tech news and link aggregators (like Digg, haha) and I suddenly had a ton of users. Eventually I figured out why. It wasn't that my app was so great exactly, but rather the idea that Google was writing a Mac client for Xbox made a great tech news story. However, that part of the story wasn't true, the project had nothing to do with Google, I was just hosting it on Google Code because it was at the time the most convenient place for a small open source project.

The episode made me wonder how often that happened. How many other projects on Google Code became part of a news cycle because people misinterpreted them as being written or endorsed by Google? Was that part of why Google Code was shut down?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?

#130

Post by pentamassiv » Tue, Aug 05, 2025, 11:57 PM UTC

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #109

pentamassiv wrote: post #105

I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…

Thank you for enigo / all you do and your support when I used the library in my little project!

You're welcome, it's nice to hear from people using it. I hope everything is going well with your new startup :-)